Benedicta Sánchez, heart of the film.
“Eucalyptus trees grow looking for the sky and the roots can measure kilometers […]. They are a plague, worse than the devil,” Amador tells his mother, Benedicta, who answers without taking her eyes off those tall eucalyptus trees that grow above the dry oaks. "If they make people suffer, it's because they suffer."
What Burns, the third film by Oliver Laxe, Jury Prize-A certain look at the last Cannes Film Festival, starts with a forest of eucalyptus trees in the dark. The absolute silence broken by the fall of the first of those trees and the second and the third, the domino effect caused by the noisy bulldozers that are felling the forest but are left standing in front of a centennial eucalyptus.
“It is a sequence that invites you to feel and not so much to think. It faithfully captures the energy with which this film has been made, the pain and rage that the decrepitude of the rural provokes in me”, explains the director, born in France, of Galician emigrant parents and that he lived his youth in Galicia and Morocco. “What burns shows the last vestiges of a world in the process of disappearing, it is a requiem to rural Galicia, to rural Spain. This opening sequence of the eucalyptus and the endings of the fire are two symphonic movements that embody nature in its agony and what I feel in the face of this agony”.
Benedicta between ashes.
What burns is the story of Amador , a convicted arsonist who is released from prison at the start of the film. He returns to his town, to his mother's house, Benedict, who, working in the garden, receives him with affection and impassive: “Are you hungry?”, as if he had never left, as if he had never been in jail. Laxe never makes it clear whether Amador was guilty or not. He is already judged by others, by the people. And meanwhile, he helps his mother with the three cows they have, with the fields, with the house, around their wood stove. The affection of the routine with which they are treated, forces us to look and seek the blame for this rural end that Laxe wants to denounce elsewhere.
Fire: cruel and beautiful.
The eucalyptus serves as a metaphor for guilt. From that blame that the rest casts on Amador, without thinking too much about it. “The eucalyptus is a tree considered by some people in Galicia as pernicious and harmful, an invader. It dries out the land and prevents the growth of local fauna and flora. And they are right. But like Amador, he is not entirely to blame either. it can also be beautiful when it is allowed to grow”, Laxe says.
Amador and Benedicta with their dog Luna.
In What burns, Laxe talks about a Galicia that is ending. Because of the fire and rural abandonment, because of the contempt of social classes, because of the effects of climate change. Fire is one of the most visible effects of all that. Arson fires or accidental fires. For all this, “the Galician countryside is a real powder keg”, Laxe says. And that is what he wanted to film.
He rolled in Os Ancares, the Galicia that he knows best, that of his grandparents, in the interior of the province of Lugo, in the Councils of Navia de Suarna, Cervantes and Becerreá.
In those mountains he began to spend the summer when he was “four or five years old”. “My grandfather was waiting for us with his donkey to take our luggage to his house, located at the end of a long goat track. We then entered another world, the heart of the mountains, there where some people still lived in a dignified and sovereign submission to the elements. In a humble acceptance of nature on which they depended, the same one that constantly reminded them that their existence was ephemeral”, recalls the filmmaker for whom Os Ancares is his home and his roots.
“Galicia and Os Ancares are made of contrasts: they are sweet and rough, rainy and bright. It is above all a mysterious, paradoxical, contradictory land... I wanted to capture her beauty, an intense and unpredictable beauty that knows no measure."
Rural Galicia in danger.
He first filmed there one summer, making friends with the fire brigades, getting close to the fire. Later, in the winter, the scenes of incessant rain. Their protagonists, Benedicta and Amador (non-professional actors, residents of the area) protecting themselves at home or in the hollow trunk of a tree. Later, with that spring of a thousand greens. And, finally, last summer, waiting again for the fire that, fortunately for Galicia, was slow in coming. Although it arrived. Real fire scenes that shake. The neighbors resisting with their hoses, the horse that appears among the ashes, the checkpoints with smoked faces. That Galicia that we also have to remember when we think every summer of its beaches, beach bars...
The winter passed by water.